English Language Teaching an der Universität Potsdam

The perspective focuses on habit formation through repetition and reinforcement. The teacher imitates language input and the students memorise and imitate language patterns. A prominent method is here the audio-lingual-method.

But the perspective does not always ensure the improvement just by performance and often students fail to transfer to real communication. Also, for some it may be boring and lack creativity.

(a) They prepare the learners for the activities and the comprehension, create attention and activate the pre-knowledge. 

(b) They support activities for structuring and supporting the comprehension. Also, they redirect and focus the learner on the topic and come into dialogue with the text. 

(c) Such tasks are used for evaluating the comprehension and are opportunities to communicate the new information (active practice). 

language skills

work ethic

social skills

social background

prior knowledge

interest

ERA approach

1. 

• traditional teaching
• PPP, FonF

2. 

• rule discovery
• planned FonF

3.

• UG parameters
• incidental FonF

4.

• L1 acquisition
• no FonF

1. PPP

PPP is about the Presentation, Practice and Production. During the presentation, the learners are exposed to patters, which they learn to control during practice and later use freely to communicate while producing speech. The PPP approach is an interventionist instruction.

2. FonF

Focus on Form is a rather active non-interventionist approach and is mainly based  on meaning and communication and "learning by opportunity". The approach deals with noticing and comparing the gap of grammatical knowledge. To fill the gap, the teacher must integrate new grammatical structures into the IL.

1. proactive, non-interventionist

2. reactive, interventionist

Though providing a framework, focus on benefits, provide planning strategies, create drafts, rewrite, give feedback and present. Clear goals and receptive activities benefit the learners outcome and progress in language learning. 

The aim is to control the cognitive strategies, do pre-(writing) task and use a genre-based approach.

It means the learner knows the crucial meaning, as well as the form and the meaning combined (building link to learn lexical use) and the appropriate use of the word (receptive and productive knowledge). 

TBLL is a task supported approach based on L2 assumptions of communication interaction. The focus is on pragmatic meaning and the gaps/lack of certain skills, knowledge (etc.). Also, the learner chooses the learning material and the outcome is non-linguistic. 

The students are supported throughout the whole process. The framework contains (several) pre-task(s), a task cycle and a language focus task/post-task. The teacher is only a motivator.

An example is the Airport-Project. 

--> students asked to discuss a topic

teacher provides material and vocabulary

develop a basis for the learners

learners solve talks in groups (reports/presentation)

analyze the outcome and practice

Culture is a shared set of meanings and is in flux as well as heterogeneous, complex and has diverse meanings. 

Culture helps to develop intercultural competences (knowledge of other social groups, open to suspend disbelief about other cultures, evaluate critically, interpret events and explain them, acquire and operate new knowledge in real time).

The learners are intercultural agents.

Psychological approach has relatively similar language acquisitions across all individuals and is a receive and process input which underlies a constructive process.

Socio-Cultural approach.

The language acquisition is a process, embedded culturally and biographically. The focus is here on context-sensitivity, investment and the developmental perspective.